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The Dark Side of Parental Love

Pub Date for Twentysomething at last! It's the book I wrote with my 28-year-old daughter Samantha Henig, and we're marking Pub Date with a book party tonight in downtown Manhattan at a bar in the basement of the Woolworth Building that, amazingly, pulled through Hurricane Sandy without flooding. Among the 150 or so guests will be my older daughter, Jess Zimmerman, 32, coming up from D.C. for the party. So I'm thinking a lot today not only what it's like to be a young adult these days, but what it's like to be their mother. And I'm remembering a strange study that Sam and I encountered while writing our book—something that had special meaning for me because both my daughters have followed in my footsteps and have become journalists, already on the ascent and ready to eclipse me professionally.

You know the old saw that you're only as happy as your unhappiest child—even if the child is an adult? There's research that supports that. Middle-aged parents' sense of well-being, according to some studies, is intimately connected to how their grown children are doing, rising and falling along with the child's. Back in the 1990s, researchers at the University of Wisconsin asked 215 fifty-something parents how their twentysomething children were faring. Were the children well-educated? well-employed? financially independent? How about their overall adjustment; were they happy? self-confident? discouraged? anxious? well-liked? And they asked whether the parents thought their kids had made the most of their abilities.

The Wisconsin researchers, led by psychologist Carol Ryff, also asked the parents how their children’s accomplishments compared to those of other kids their age. And one more question that turned out to be the juiciest: they asked the parents how their kids compared to what they had been like back in the day, when they themselves were young.

Most of the findings were pretty much what anyone who’s been stuck in an elevator with that “proud parent of an honor roll student” would expect: the more well-adjusted and accomplished the child, the happier the parents. Parents who were pleased with how their kids turned out had higher levels of self-acceptance, a feeling of environmental mastery, and a sense of purpose in their lives. But there was one finding that was not only surprising but a bit disconcerting. The parents who thought their kids were better-adjusted than they themselves had been in their twenties weren’t all that pleased. In fact, thinking their kids were faring better than they had made them downright grumpy.

Isn’t this counterintuitive? “Why would parents not feel better about themselves,” the researchers mused, “if their children were doing better than they had done, as the American Dream suggests?”

The answer, it seems, is that parents aren’t quite as self-effacing and pure of heart as the Dream would have it. Yes, we want our children to have better lives than we did—at least, that’s the official party line. But life is complicated. People are complex. And parents—yes, even parents—can hold two competing emotions at the same time.

“Children who are accomplished and well-adjusted may occasion pride, and even vicarious enjoyment, among parents,” Ryff and her colleagues wrote. “Yet, these same wonderful children may evoke envy and the sense of missed opportunities in parents’ own lives.” When you get right down to it, parents’ attitude toward their children’s success is a lot like their attitude toward anyone’s success: it sort of makes them feel worse about themselves.

The anthropologist Lionel Tiger once described parenthood as “a set of radically unselfish and often incomprehensibly inconvenient activities.” There's a rumor going around that the dirty little secret of parenthood—the secret that other parents won’t tell you, because misery loves company—is that those first 18 years of parenting are the most difficult, most exhausting, least fulfilling years of anyone’s life. That's a debate for another time. But Tiger is right about this: parenthooddoes require a certain amount of selflessness and inconvenience. And after all those years of devoted attention, it can be difficult to shift gears—especially when we wake up, look at our adult children, and see a stark reminder of our own mortality.

I've been dealing with an envious mother for twenty years, with no sign of it letting up.

I think part of it is "culture envy" - when she got pregnant at 18 (1972)she lost her job and had to marry my father. Sometimes we forget just how much the world has changed in the last 50-60 years.

As soon as I started choosing what happened next in my life - getting a job at head office, choosing the man I wanted to marry - THAT'S when she got massively competitive. Even my divorce and late-life pregnancy (I was 35) brought out the worst in her.

The worst is when parents simultaneously try to make you into whatever they couldn't be, but also try to keep you from having things that they didn't or showing extreme distress when you have things they didn't.

These first two comments (from people who have chosen, for obvious reasons, to remain anonymous) suggest that there are many ways for parents to undermine their young-adult children, and many explanations for why we might do so. Anyone who thought that parenting gets easier once the kids are grown clearly wasn't a grown-up with parents of his own!

I can't pretend I'll be any nobler than others. So I hope to god I'm a grumpy bitter old lady when my baby is grown and doing everything I wish I'd had the focus and gumption to do. Probably the best I can do is acknowledge it and make sure it's not his problem.

Oh, and save for retirement. Since I had him at 42, when he's in his 20s, I'll be in my 60s and if he's self-sufficient, then I can retire and finally spend time travelling and relaxing with friends. It'll be harder to be bitter if I'm sunning myself somewhere in Belize or Croatia or something.

It's just the natural order of things, particularly among mothers and daughters. I think mothers have always envied the increasing choices and opportunities their daughters had that earlier generations were denied, but they also fought tooth and nail for them to have those choices and wouldn't want it any other way. When I was in high school in the 70's, I told my guidance counselor I wanted to become an airline pilot. He scoffed and told me to forget it - that was a man's job. My daughter is now a doctor and wonders why I didn't just go ahead and become a pilot anyway. She doesn't grasp how overt the oppression and sexism were in those days. My 83-year-old-mother envied me for having the courage to get a divorce and build a new life for myself after raising my kids, since she felt she had to stay in an abusive marriage her whole life. I'm very proud and happy for my daughter and all young women, but their successes were built on the backs of their foremothers and, although a little acknowledgment would be nice to hear, it's the conundrum of motherhood that we must let go, wish them well, and look at their successes as our successes, too.